


my hand on your scar, and yours on my heart

by Alitheia



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Comfort No Hurt, Getting Together, M/M, Post-S6, everything is okay and everyone is happy, s6 fucking murdered me i need to vent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-25 07:30:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14972156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alitheia/pseuds/Alitheia
Summary: Memories are tricky, but Shiro digs them up from the dusty corners of his jumbled mind, and gathers all the pieces like precious jewels; putting together a mosaic picture of space, a robot lion, and a man.Keith.





	my hand on your scar, and yours on my heart

**Author's Note:**

> s6 is literal perfection and idk what to do with it tbh but i still need to vent, so here have my tears
> 
> happy reading! <3

Colors explode when Shiro opens his eyes.

He’d been in the dark for far too long, treading aimlessly under vast purple skies glittered with unknown stars, in between no days and no night, on a land where time and thoughts melted into one.

Disoriented, dizzy, he can’t figure anything out yet, but whatever that’s under him seems solid, unlike the endless nothingness he stared at when he desperately tried to find the horizon. Memories are tricky, but Shiro digs them up from the dusty corners of his jumbled mind, and gathers all the pieces like precious jewels; putting together a mosaic picture of space, a robot lion, and a man.

 _Keith_.

The lights in his sight finally start to make sense and Keith comes into view. He’s sitting by Shiro’s right side, arms folded and head hung low, face half-hidden in messy black hair, silent in a steady breath. _Keith found him_ _again_ , he realizes, and suddenly his heart feels too large for his ribcage to hold. Shiro could disappear somewhere in the farthest stretch of the universe, he could lose his body, he could _die_ , and Keith would still find him and bring him back, no matter how many times it takes, just like he promised.

Shiro lifts his arm to reach for him, only to realize that not much of it remains. Right. Keith had to cut the Galra arm off to save him, when they were fighting and he nearly killed—

Then it all comes pouring down at once. The witch, the clones, the scream out of Keith’s lips when Shiro tried to cut his head in half. His gaze falls onto the scar left on the other man’s cheek and in an instant, he’s ripped open with emotions—horror, guilt, anger, sorrow, anguish—it’s all too soon, too great, too _much_ —

“Shiro?” A tiny voice, followed by a light touch on his forehead. It grounds him back. “Are you okay?”

“Keith,” he manages to let out, “ _Keith_.”

“I’m here, Shiro,” another hand on his chest, over his heartbeat, “you’re safe, you’re safe now. You’re gonna be okay. I’m here.”

Shiro doesn’t remember shutting his eyes, but when he opens them again he sees Keith leaning in, still so caring and protective even after all that’s done to him, and Shiro can’t stand it. Keith deserves everything but Shiro doesn’t deserve this man.

“I’m sorry.” It comes out almost like a sob. He wants to pull Keith into his embrace, engulfing him with warmth and hopefully all the feelings that he never said. He wants to stroke Keith’s hair and caress his cheek until his touch could erase the scar. He wants to tell and do so much but the way Keith stares at him is overwhelming, wide and expectant and painted with worry, that all he does in the end is to take the hand on his chest and squeezes. “I’m so sorry, Keith.”

Keith’s hand on his head stays, now moving to brush a little bit of bangs and Shiro faintly wishes he’ll never pull it away. “For what?”

He shifts so he can reach the other’s face with his left hand. Shiro follows the dark line on Keith’s cheek with his thumb, etched into the fair skin by his very own hands. Words feel like coals burning at the back of his throat, so he holds back a little longer. Shiro ruined a universe’s ultimate creation, and yet Keith still looks so, so stunningly beautiful, perfect in every way he is. “For this. For everything.”

“It wasn’t you.”

“He’s still me, to some extent,” Shiro says, pulling back his hand as it forms a fist, “I should’ve tried harder to stop him, or keep trying to warn the others before all this happened, before I hurt you too much.”

“Fine, it wasn’t him either, and you did all you could, it was the witch, but certainly _not_ you,” Keith replied, with a sense of finality that even Shiro can’t argue. “And besides, it’s just a scratch, Shiro, while I fucking cut your arm off. _I’m_ sorry.”

He rather loses an arm any day— _hell_ , Shiro would choose losing both if that meant not losing Keith. There’s a hint of a playful tone in Keith’s voice, like he’s trying to lighten up the atmosphere, telling him not to worry that much. He’s too selfless for his own good, but this can come again later. Shiro tries to focus on what they have now. “So, I guess we’re even?”

Keith chuckles and it’s a sound that Shiro wants to hear all day. “Guess we are.”

A laugh escapes him as well, probably the first in who knows how long, because time was nonexistent before and his head is filled with memories that aren’t exactly his. Shiro takes a deep breath, gives a look around the room, and decides he doesn’t know where they are. Does it matter, though? The only thing that really catches his attention right now is how brilliant Keith’s mauve orbs under the yellowish lights and how wonderfully Keith’s figure outlined by the shadows.

How long has it been? How far have they been apart? Now that he has the time, Shiro takes in every inch of it; the raven hair that frames Keith’s face is longer, his shoulders are broader, his muscles seem more defined. The man before him is now older, taller, stronger—when did that happen? It’s not the Keith he last saw when he went to join the Blades, but the way he looks at Shiro now, open and trusting, the way he touches, careful and assuring and perhaps a little bit shy—it may not be the Keith he last saw, but it’s the Keith that Shiro knows.

“You’re staring,” Keith says with a smile, “is there something on my face? Except for the scar, of course.”

Shiro doesn’t remember when did his sense of humor turn this shitty too, but it takes a great effort not to laugh at every joke Keith makes, no matter how terrible it is. “You really did change, didn't you…?”

The curve of his lips widens. “It’s a long story.”

“Then maybe you should start now.”

“I’ll tell you after you eat something. You think you can get up?”

He pushes himself into a sitting position, grunting when his head feels like being hammered and his body like he has just fallen off a cliff, but he’s made it this far, he’ll live. Keith starts to draw away when he’s sure Shiro is all right, but Shiro catches his hand and holds it on his lap. Keith isn’t wearing his usual gloves, Shiro rubs the calluses and the marks left by wounds.

“What do you think will come after this?” he asks quietly, almost in a whisper. He’s not even sure what or when he’s referring to. The world, tomorrow? The two of them, in the near future? There’s a small part of him that just wants to lie down for good and throw the whole defending the universe shebang to somebody else, but he can’t, can he?

“I don’t know yet,” Keith holds his hand back, firmly, “but whatever comes, Shiro, I swear I won’t ever let anything happen to you again.”

Shiro turns to him, and his reply evaporates into air. Was there even a need to say things to begin with? Keith gets him as if their brains were set to receive the same channel. Perhaps it’s the reason why he has always found Shiro, the reason why their bond has always been the deepest and strongest. There’s just something fierce in the way Keith loves, an edge in his voice that convinces Shiro he’ll fight anything that comes to harm, that he’ll never let go. This is the person that Shiro has never given up, and he has grown into the only one who’ll never give up on Shiro too.

But Keith isn’t the only one that grows. There’s also something that’s been blooming in Shiro’s chest for a long time, something scary and beautiful and he doesn’t know what to do with it. Foolishly he thought going off into space would help to soften his feelings, but no, the second time he met Keith when he woke up on Earth after being an alien captive for a year, Shiro fell for him all over again, and it kept on repeating until he lost the count.

No matter how long, how far, how many more times, he knows he’ll always love Keith.

And so Shiro does the one thing that his brain deems logical; he sneaks his hand to Keith’s nape and brings him in close, enough to land a gentle kiss on his lips. There’s no hesitation, or there might have been in the past, but it’s long gone the moment Keith stepped into the Black Lion to pilot her for the first time, when his thoughts and feelings laid bare and Shiro could feel all of them through their bond with the lion. But Shiro still pauses, giving the both of them a little bit of time to think, he knows Keith will never hate him but he wants to make sure that Keith wants this, _wants him too_ —and then everything else stops when Keith kisses back, self-assured and tender, while bliss washes over Shiro like a giant wave.

No words, no doubts; this is just how they ought to be, right from the start.

Keith crawls into the bed and plants himself on his side after. They stay in each other’s hold for a while, listening to each other’s breath, drawing tiny circles on each other’s skin. Shiro inhales; Keith is both solid and pliant, pressed against him, and he’s reminded again why the universe is worth defending, because sometimes the world no longer means a place.

Because he finds it to be a person instead.

“So, Keith,” Shiro finally asks, “where are we going now?”

“Home.” Keith raises his head, smiling at him bright enough to put the sun to shame, and Shiro captures every detail and every color in his mind, adding in another mosaic into his memory, thinking, he’s already home.

**Author's Note:**

> “Oh, by the way.”
> 
> “Yeah?”
> 
> “I love you too, Keith.”


End file.
